David Byrne, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth met at the hip Rhode Island School of Design and brought their performance-art ethos into the band they formed with former Harvard teacher Jerry Harrison. With Weymouth's footsteps-down-a-dark-alleyway bass, Byrne's main lyrical thrust was inspired by dancer Barbara Conway whose pet phrase was "pee-kay!": her shorthand for psychokiller. In a tragic postscript, Conway was murdered by a stalker in 1985.

With its contemptuous lyrics and jangling guitars, No Compassion foreshadowed 1980s indie acts such as the Smiths. The opening riff yawns out elastic notes as Byrne explains how bored he is by people in love with their own disfunctionality. An early critic brilliantly compared his vocal technique with that of "a seagull talking to its shrink".

Crackling with Eno's sonic wizardry, the band's third album was an experimental blend of angular funk-rock and African rhythms, with Life During Wartime as its driving centrepiece. Byrne yelped: "This ain't no mudd club, or C B G B/ I ain't got time for that now."

With the aid of a groundbreaking video - in which Byrne mimicked the stylised gestures of American televangelist Earnest Angley - this bluntly philosophical song gave the band their first top-20 UK hit. Questioning the goals of the new consumer culture, Byrne asked with arch dissatisfaction: "How did I get here?"

Advised by Eno to "think of the radio", the band simplified their sound and lightened up a little. Bouncing along with simple, spaced-out riffs, And She Was is about the "tacky transcendence" of an acid-dropping Baltimore girl Byrne had known. The song's heroine levitates above the lawns of suburbia, taking off her dress and moving very slowly.

Love it or hate it, this thundering juggernaut remains beloved of drive-time DJs. In the opening section, a secular choir explain that they know where they're going, but they don't know where they've been, while Byrne spatters syncopated "Ha!"s onto the musical canvas to a Pollock-esque effect.

The video for Wild Wild Life was meant to be a parody of the MTV style, but ended up winning an MTV award. Increasingly angry about Ronald Reagan's erosion of civil liberties and "thought control", Byrne growled, "I wrestle with your conscience."

Talking Heads drifted apart as Franz and Weymouth spent more time on their disco side-project, Tom Tom Club, and Byrne focused on his world-music-infused solo career. He returned to popular form in 2001 and let down his guard of ironic detachment to lead listeners into a strange, sorrowful world where "beauty lies on mattress springs, wearing just her underthings".

Byrne's glorious dancefloor collaboration with the DJ group X Press 2 went to number two in the UK charts within its first week of release. Back on Top of the Pops, grey-haired and grinning in his our-man-in-Havana suit Byrne's contagious chorus stretches out unapologetically: "I-I-I-I-I'm wicked and I'm lazy/ Ooohhh, don't you want to save me?"Emerging in strange fits of nervous energy from New York's punk scene in the late seventies, Talking Heads combined art-school intellectualism with pop grooves and world rhythms to become one of the most critically acclaimed bands of the 1980s. Helen Brown picks their ten finest moments.